Special Report Transcript Episode 87, Section 2, Time 02:45

‘The Violated’ // On the 15th of April 1996, almost exactly two years ago, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission took its seat for the first time in the East London City Hall. The road ahead was an unknown one. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu symbolically opened proceedings a solemn hymn swept through the audience. Over the next 14 months hymns and songs and prayer would become the familiar and comforting rituals in the many moments of great stress or sadness. The first victims to speak before the Commission came from the struggle womb of the Eastern Cape. Widows who carried the names of men, who had become icons of liberation. But then there were the other brave pioneers of the South African truth process: the ordinary people who spoke about lives that had changed forever after torture, bullets or bombs. As they spoke the first words in the great telling of our past their words were relayed by television and radio to millions of South Africans and the world. For the next year and a half their words of disappearance and abduction, torture and death, executions and betrayal would be echoed from Messina to Maotsi, from Prieska to Port Elizabeth and from the border of Lesotho to sandy Cape Flats. The victims of police torture and brutality were more widespread than ever imagined. Their voices were testimony to the lonely horror of John Vorster Square’s tenth floor and Port Elizabeth’s Sanlam building, of the silent dorm in detention cells across the country.

Notes: First TRC hearing; Cradock Four Widows; Malgas; Archbishop Tutu breaks down

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